Cleaning Your Paint Buckets After Use. Professional Painting Tips.

This is Chris, the Idaho painter here in Boise, Idaho, and coming to you with a quick tip on how we actually go about cleaning our buckets at the end of the day. And when we're painting on a typical exterior of a home, we're painting anywhere from four to five to even six colors. And if we've got four to five guys working on the job, um we could have up to five, even up to 10 buckets at the end of the day that have paint in them. And I'm going to show you a quick method how we actually go about cleaning our buckets. And I believe it's a little faster, a little more efficient. And if we can be faster and more efficient, then our company makes a little bit more money. And at the end of the day, you're going to have your paint in your bucket. And we typically use these size buckets right here for our paint. And we usually have a bucket screen in them. And we'll take the excess paint. We always want to scrape all the excess paint out into our paint can because we want to be able to use that on the next job or the same job. We don't ever want to waste any paint. So, we actually take our paintbrush and we're going to scrape out the inside of the bucket and scrape out as much of the paint as we can. And then once we get as much of the paint out by scraping it out with a paintbrush, then we're going to take our paintbrush and paint and brush the paint up the sidewalls of our pale. And then we're going to take that pale once we get all the paint out, we're going to put that pale in our van. And typically on a warm summer day during the summertime up here in Idaho, the bucket's going to be dry. the next time we go into the van the next day. It usually takes only about four to five hours for it to dry. And we do like this method uh versus actually cleaning it water with water because the paint actually will evaporate and dry a lot faster than the water will. So if we come in this bucket has water in it the next day, then we've got to take a rag and wipe the water out. So, and we take do this method wiping the paint up the sidewalls. And then after it builds about, you know, five days, five colors of paint, we're just going to peel that bucket out. And after the first coat of paint inside this bucket, at any point in time, if you come into this bucket and you want to peel the paint out because the paint is wet, or you just want to take some of the paint out because of the weight of the bucket, you can peel it out. So, going to clean the bucket out as much as we can by pulling the excess paint out. And then we actually just grab an edge of this bucket. And you can see I'll pull this bucket's been used probably, you know, about five times. And then the screen will just come right out. And you can just see the bucket just peels out. It's completely clean. And this is what the paint that comes out, what it looks like. And this is approximately five different colors of paint. Now I've got a dry, clean bucket. Take put my bucket screen back in. And this method of cleaning our buckets we found over the years is the fastest, most efficient way to cleaning them. Got another bucket right here. This bucket's probably got, you know, three to four coats of paint in it. I can just actually grab again pulling the paint. The screen sometimes sticks will stick to the side of the bucket, but you can see the screen will actually pull the paint right off too. This works with most of your almost all of your 100% acrylic paints. This method on your first coat that you actually put in the bucket. If it's a flat paint, it won't peel out as much. This works with all our exterior paints cuz we use a satin 100% acrylic paint from Sher Williams, which is super paint. Typically works with all your interior paints, too, that are not flat, but eggshell, satin, semig gloss or above. But you can see the bucket. This one had a little bit left in the bottom. We can peel it out. And the bucket is eventually clean and dried, ready for use. This is Chris, the Idaho Painter, coming to you with our quick and simple method of cleaning your buckets at the end of the